Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/35] exec: drop BQL from interrupt handling

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 17/09/2018 17:30, Emilio G. Cota wrote:

> This series comes originally from a series of patches that Paolo
> sent to me a long time ago. I have kept most of his S-o-b tags,
> but I have done the forward port of the patches to the current
> QEMU code base, so please blame all possible bugs on me, not him.
> 
> The goal of this series is to push the BQL out of interrupt
> handling wherever possible. Many targets do not need the BQL
> to handle interrupts, so for those targets we get rid of the
> BQL in interrupt handling. In TCG mode, this by itself does
> not yield measurable performance gains. However, it is a
> necessary first step before tackling BQL contention when
> managing CPU states (i.e. exiting the exec loop always
> involves taking the BQL, which does not scale).
> 
> The patches:
> 
> - Patch 0 accesses icount_decr.u16 consistently with atomics.
>   This is important because we use it across threads to signal
>   that an interrupt is pending.
> 
> - 2-28: convert direct callers of cpu->interrupt_request
>   to use atomic accesses or CPU helper functions that use atomics.
>   I have broken these up into individual patches to ease review.
>   Note that in some cases I have added many atomic_reads, most
>   of which are probably unnecessary. However, I'd leave this up
>   to the maintainers, since I do not want to break things by
>   doing a single atomic_read(&cpu->interrupt_request) at the
>   beginning of a function and then miss subsequent updates to
>   cpu->interrupt_request.
> 
> - 29-31: drop the BQL requirement when handling cpu->interrupt_request
> 
> - 32-33: drop now unnecessary BQL acquisitions in i386 and ppc
> 
> - 34-35: push down the BQL acquisition to cpu->do_interrupt
>   and cpu->cpu_exec_interrupt. Here I am Cc'ing everyone so that
>   we can make sure I am not missing any target that requires
>   the BQL on either do_interrupt or cpu_exec_interrupt.
> 
> This series is checkpatch-clean, and can be fetched from:
>   https://github.com/cota/qemu/tree/cpu-lock
> 
> Note that the series applies on top of patches that are
> already on the qemu-devel list and will hopefully soon
> be upstream. This series begins after commit
> 4ece0cbd74 ("cpus: access .qemu_icount_bias with atomic64")
> in that tree.

I ran the above cpu-lock branch through my SPARC32 and SPARC64 test suite just 
to be
sure, and everything appeared to work fine. So for the SPARC32/64 patches:

Tested-by: Mark Cave-Ayland <address@hidden>


ATB,

Mark.